Cleaning for Westboro and Hintonburg homes and studios

This is the most mixed housing stock in the city for this trade. A single block can hold a 1920s worker's cottage, an infill semi finished in 2023, a converted duplex and a ground-floor commercial unit, and each is a different job at a different price. Infill builds are fast to clean, with sealed floors, large glazing and few mouldings. The older cottages behind them have plaster, painted trim and small awkward bathrooms that take twice as long per square metre.

Renovation is close to constant along the Wellington and Richmond corridors, and that shapes what gets bought here. A great deal of the work is post-renovation dust removal rather than routine cleaning, and the two should never be confused in a quote. Drywall dust needs HEPA filtration and vacuuming rather than wiping, and a house renovated through an Ottawa winter with the furnace running holds dust in its ducts and keeps releasing it for weeks. Plaster dust in the older houses is heavier and more abrasive than drywall dust and is harder on equipment.

The older housing raises a question a cleaner cannot answer. Homes from before the late 1970s may contain lead paint, and some attics hold vermiculite. Testing and abatement of either is regulated specialist work, and it is not something a cleaning company should be sanding, scraping or dry-dusting. Where a renovation is planned in a house of that age, the testing happens before demolition rather than after the cleaner arrives.

Small commercial units on the two main streets are the other half of the work. A storefront or a studio of a few hundred square feet is usually priced hourly rather than per square foot, and the thing to nail down is who is responsible for the entrance glass and the sidewalk-facing floor in winter, because that is where the salt arrives and it is the first thing a customer sees.